The Long Neck Kareni

Chang Mai is a great jumping off point to see the north of the country. We headed north to the border with Burma one day and made several stops. One of our stops was to visit the long neck Kareni hill tribe. These people are refugees from Burma and have now settled in the north of Thailand. Unfortunately, they have awful trouble securing citizenship, which means they cannot own land. Therefore their only real source of income now is visiting tourists. The tribe is famous because from an early age many of the women in the tribe begin putting brass rings around their neck, producing the effect of an elongated neck (although it is in fact the collar bones that have moved down, not the neck getting longer).

I didn't really enjoy the visit to be honest. They almost put themselves on display in the village especially for the tourists. You don't learn anything about the tribe, you don't really get to talk to the people there and it all appears to be just one big tourist trap. I felt quite uncomfortable walking through the village and definitely didn't take any pictures. I was more tempted to take pictures of the tourists taking pictutes.

I did hear of people going to visit other tribes where they stayed the night with the tribe with a full day visit - which I imagine is much better.

We would later visit another Kareni (not long neck this time) tribe elsewhere on a different day for an equally short period of time. This time however the village wasn't putting themselves on show. The whole thing felt far more comfortable. Much easier to chat to people. I would still prefer not to have visited any of the hill tribe villages at all - only for the fact that they were part of a longer day trip to other things we probably wouldn't - at the end of the day you're just another one of a million tourists who would turn up at that village that year.